


Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines

by sunjolras



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-19
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 19:05:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/726862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunjolras/pseuds/sunjolras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is the last pain.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by jehans' "stop all the clocks". title from pablo neruda.

It happens suddenly, as tragedies often do.

A mangled bicycle, flowers spilling from the basket and onto the pavement, a bloodstained ribbon.

The driver calls for help with shaking hands and can’t bear to look at the lovely boy he destroyed.

Dead on arrival.

-

What are they saying to him?

His friends’ lips move in ugly twists and pinched syllables, and Courfeyrac’s brain doesn’t translate any of it.

Why do they look so sad?

They should be celebrating. There’s a new ring around Cosette’s finger and Marius was proud. Now, they’re both hunched over like their chests are too heavy and no one is smiling.

Where is Jehan? 

He would know what to do, how to dissolve the sudden shadows. Feuilly is crying and the sight is so very wrong that Courfeyrac almost sends a text to Prouvaire asking if the world has gone mad. His fingers can’t move, though, and his lungs won’t fill. Distantly, he knows the message would go undelivered.

He collapses into a chair because his world is dark.

-

Jehan never officially moved in, but they both knew it happened when Jehan’s potted plants appeared on the kitchen windowsill and his sweaters kept winding up in Courfeyrac’s laundry.

Wash in cold water.

Lay out to dry.

They’re folded neatly next to his shirts, second drawer from the bottom, and Courfeyrac wants to climb inside to cocoon himself in soft fabric that still smells like him and colors that bleed too easily when wet.

The space he takes up only emphasizes the void. Courfeyrac can’t stay here, with Jehan’s flowers and words and favorite mug and the imprint his body made in the couch he convinced Courfeyrac to buy two months ago.

His presence illuminates every corner, and Courfeyrac has to turn his face away.

-

His light is gone.

He sobs through his speech, but he finishes because Jehan deserves that, and Combeferre wraps an arm around him as he sits down. The tears don’t stop, he’s an endless well, he is not strong enough for dignity.

Courfeyrac picked out his last ribbon; the pale green one that he wore on the best days, the happiest days. It matched his eyes.

Gathered around his grave, no one speaks. Bahorel’s hand covers his eyes, hiding his grief as his shoulders shake and shake. Beside him, Grantaire stares at the grass with red, swollen eyes, and Cosette grips his hand tightly while Marius buries his face in her hair. Enjolras and Combeferre are anchors at Courfeyrac’s sides, reassuringly solid, letting him know that he is not alone here. 

They all loved Jean Prouvaire fiercely, unconditionally, and it’s probably for the best that no more words are spoken. 

Jehan was always better at them anyway.

-

Courfeyrac understandably loses himself after the funeral. It was the closing of a door he can never reopen, barring him from a room filled with bright laughter and poetry whispered against his skin. The only place he ever felt whole and good.

His friends leave him when he says he wants to be alone, and Musichetta is the one who finds him passed out on the kitchen floor. Bossuet carries him to the car and Joly takes a shuddering breath before taking his pulse. 

He almost doesn’t make it. It worries his friends when they don’t know which outcome is crueler.

It ends up being the first incident in a heart-breaking chain that only goes downhill from there.

Combeferre packs a bag for him and Courfeyrac wonders how he could step into that apartment and not get lost in the traces of Jehan.

-

He walks around on stiff legs, talks with a brittle voice, goes through all the motions of someone trying to cope.

His body aches and screams for Jehan and the home they built within each other. The foundation thumps in time with Courfeyrac’s pulse, a constant reminder that he is alive. The eaves tremble and dip under the weight of his sorrow, a constant reminder that Jehan is not.

They were going to find a house to make their own. Prouvaire wanted lace curtains, even though Courfeyrac told him he would burn them, and they both agreed that decorative throw pillows were silly. They would have had a yellow door and a porch that did not match. 

With sleep heavy on their tongues, they wrote their future together.

Courfeyrac doesn’t know how to finish his story when Jehan was supposed to be the final chapter.


End file.
